New Delhi:
Back from a one-of-a-kind BJP executive meet, where a new president minced no words in his effort to jolt the party out of all complacency, party patriarch LK Advani has reflected on the three days and the new kid on the block, on his blog,
The Journey Continues.
Gadkari gets a firm thumbs up.
In the latest post, "Our Party's Seventeenth President", Advani dwells on the history of the BJP and its presidents, and then writes: "A three-day session of the Bharatiya Janata Party's National Council cum National Executive has just ended at Indore.
"The session, attended by nearly four thousand delegates witnessed the Party's newly elected National President Shri Nitin Gadkari formally taking over the reins of office, delivering his first Presidential Address, and interacting with senior state BJP representatives, and BJP Chief Ministers at a single combined conclave for the first time.
"For Gadkariji, this must have been no doubt a very fruitful and worthwhile experience.
"But as a party activist who has attended every single National Council session of the party since the First National Conference held at Kanpur in 1953, I can say that the participants at this session had all arrived at the tented township put up at Indore with a question mark writ large and bold on their faces. The question bothering them all was: Will the new All India President of the Party, 52-year old Nitin Gadkari, be able to inspire confidence in the Party cadres, seemingly disheartened and disappointed by two successive setbacks in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004 and 2009 ?
"Again having attended all such gatherings in the past I am in a position to affirm that seldom before have I seen delegates so upbeat, and enthusiastic participants in every single programme at the session as I have seen this time."
He writes that he saw "all the initial scepticism rapidly melting away, so that when the delegates left Indore on the third day all their doubts had been replaced by a mood of optimism and confidence, and a strong feeling that the attributes of transparent frankness and forthrightness that they had been able to discern in the new president were exactly what the party needed at this point of time."
Advani also reflects on how Indore as a choice of venue was significant for him, personally. "While I was gathering my thoughts for my concluding remarks to the session, it struck me that for me personally, it was in a way significant that Indore had been chosen as venue for this session. The first city I visited outside Sind, the region where I was born and where I spent the first twenty years of my life, was Indore. This was in 1943, when I was just 16 years old. My Indore visit was for an RSS training camp (my First Year OTC)."
He recalls that in his speech on the last day of the Indore meet he reminisced: "For me this 67-year-long journey from Indore to Indore has been really breathtaking and exhilarating."
Advani also dwells on the rise and fall of the party in his contemplative blog post: "In the last two decades of this period, particularly, we have seen the party rising like a phoenix from its ashes. The year 1984 saw the BJP slump to the lowest point in its political career - only two Lok Sabha seats in the entire country! And yet we all witnessed a virtual revolution taking place five years later. 1989 proved revolutionary both on the global level as well as on the national level. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall that year led to the disintegration of the Marxist empire. In Indian politics, the 1989 Lok Sabha election saw BJP make a huge leap forward, from two seats to eight six seats! Looking back it is the tremendous appeal of the Ayodhya movement which enabled us to smash Congress hegemony for all time in national politics and transform India into a bipolar polity!"